Hybrid Software and System Development in Practice: Waterfall, Scrum, and Beyond

Software and system development faces numerous challenges of rapidly changing markets. To address such challenges, companies and projects design and adopt specific development approaches by combining well-structured comprehensive methods and flexible agile practices. Yet, the number of methods and practices is large, and available studies argue that the actual process composition is carried out in a fairly ad-hoc manner. The present paper reports on a survey on hybrid software development approaches. We study which approaches are used in practice, how different approaches are combined, and what contextual factors influence the use and combination of hybrid software development approaches. Our results from 69 study participants show a variety of development approaches used and combined in practice. We show that most combinations follow a pattern in which a traditional process model serves as framework in which several fine-grained (agile) practices are plugged in. We further show that hybrid software development approaches are independent from the company size and external triggers. We conclude that such approaches are the results of a natural process evolution, which is mainly driven by experience, learning, and pragmatism

Agile Medical Device Software Development: Introducing Agile Practices into MDevSPICE®

Medical device software is usually embedded within the overall system as one of the sub-systems. It needs to be integrated with other sub-systems such as the electrical and mechanical for a functional medical device to be developed. In order to develop a working medical device system through integrating its sub-systems, the sub-systems’ requirements have to be derived from the overall medical device system requirements. The system requirements are continuously collected, analysed and built from the needs of different stakeholders such as patients, health professionals and other companies offering relevant devices, interfaces and software related to the medical device system under development. Various regulatory requirements have to be achieved for a medical device to be allowed market access. We have developed and piloted a medical device software process assessment framework called MDevSPICE® that integrates the regulatory requirements from the relevant medical device software standards. This paper describes how the MDevSPICE® framework has been designed to enable medical device software developers to produce software that will be safe and easily integrated with other sub-systems of the overall medical device. We also describe the lessons learned from piloting MDevSPICE® in the medical device industry and introduce an agile methodology together with its benefits and challenges. This paper outlines how MDevSPICE® can be extended to include agile practices to enable medical device software development to be performed in a more flexible manner

Hybrid software and system development in practice: waterfall, scrum, and beyond

Software and system development faces numerous challenges of rapidly changing markets. To address such challenges, companies and projects design and adopt specific development approaches by combining well-structured methods and flexible agile practices. Yet, the number of methods and practices is large and the actual process composition is often carried out in an ad-hoc manner. This paper reports on a survey on hybrid software development approaches. We study which approaches are used in practice, how different approaches are combined, and what contextual factors influence the use and combination of hybrid software development approaches

Hybrid Software and System Development in Practice: Waterfall, Scrum, and Beyond

Software and system development faces numerous challenges of rapidly changing markets. To address such challenges, companies and projects design and adopt speciĄc development approaches by combining well-structured methods and Ćexible agile practices. Yet, the number of methods and practices is large and the actual process composition is often carried out in an ad-hoc manner. This paper reports on a survey on hybrid software development approaches. We study which approaches are used in practice, how diferent approaches are combined, and what contextual factors inĆuence the use and combination of hybrid software development approaches. This summary refers to the paper Hybrid Software and System Development in Practice: Waterfall, Scrum, and Beyond [Ku17]. This paper was published as full research paper in the proceedings of the International Conference on Software System Process